matt40k

Learning SQL makes sense. If you have an opportunity to learn it, do it. From a schools point of view, if you go down this route, you must accept folks will move on and you need to have a continuous rolling plan to bring in new blood. The job market at the moment for data folks is nuts and its going to get worse - private sector is paying 2-3x times the public sector is paying AND they have better terms and benefits. Just for goodness sake, backup\restore a test copy of the database and work on the test copy. Interesting. Quoting a 7+ year old document that says "estimate", provides no reference data and is by department (whatever) that no longer exists. Anyway, good luck to the folks who are busy changing the future rather then bashing at the past.

I think we should be clear It's possible it the message got lost in the noise \ other things took priority at the time. Not everyone as to agree, but the bulk of them need to agree. We're not suggesting anything wasn't done correctly and is illegal. Just to want to be clear before people start slinging solicitors around. Final point. Power BI might be free to get going, but it has a cost. You're time isn't free and you'll need to get the OK before you start - you need to check your data policy covers its usage for starters and you definitely want to check your covered before you publish - don't want parents kicking up a fuss when they find out you've send their data to Ireland

Again, LA could only do that if the schools agreed - the idea was buying in bulk = discounts, its what MAT's are doing nowadays. IMHO it's better to actually suggest these solutions then to bash folks trying to help (LAs etc) and whine about how broken the system is. At the end of the day, we're talking about a few thousand pound, yes it's alot of money, but at best we can reduce it down to few hundred and I'm not 100% sold on the real-world benefits to the students, especially when you look at the other common sense changes that need to happen - I've worked in schools that have boilers from the dark ages, they cost a small fortune to run - both in terms of maintenance and gas\electric\oil. Replacing them would save a thousand and would have a guarantee positive impact (swimming pool not being closed or school closed in winter and more money for staff). It's a question of working down the list and each school will be at different points and the MIS will be at different proprieties, personally, primary schools who use SIMS, change MIS should be pretty high on the list, it just doesn't make sense when you look at the alternatives like ScholarPack. I think Capita agrees as they've released SIMS8 for primaries. Will it be the answer? I don't know. 100% agree, if you're spending hundreds on your "core" MIS, then thousands on extras. That's room for improvement. If you're having to recruit loads of extra admin staff to "workaround" your MIS. That's room for improvement. But not picking your ideal MIS because its a monopoly - that's foolish. Not changing your MIS (or anything for that matter) because "it's how we've always done it" that is dangerous! (going off topic - that reminds me of a story of why you need to understand the process and the purpose and not just what buttons to push) Old Staff - "Put this (default value) into that field" New Staff - "Why?" Old - "We've always done that." New - "Well why don't we not do that and save ourselves some hassle" Old - "OK, uh, won't let me save if it doesn't have something" New - "Shall we ask support how to change it so we can save it without it" Support - "You need that for census, if you don't enter a valid value your Census will be off and it will affect your funding"

You're missing the point. MI is operational - its focus is normalization - storing data once, optimized for writes. BI is denormalization, it doesn't matter data is stored multiple times, its optimized for reads. The BI produce should be product agnostic - your business (school) isn't just 1 system. MI is day-to-day, BI is more long term. It physically can't be one product \ system - their purposes are totally polar. OMG, next you'll be talking about interactive whiteboards! 100%. But this is just common sense! This annoys me so much, this stupid point of view - LA are public sector, the same as schools. They only have the schools best interest at heart. They are fully transparent and follow strict rules. If you don't like the recommend MIS system, fine, don't use it. Use something else. They pick the system based on their schools input. As painful as it is, they picked SIMS for one reason. It was the best of a the (bad) bunch. The fact schools are switches now only proves MIS providers have upped their game

I hate my self for saying this, but "out-of-the-box" reporting meets the requirements of a school, there is a fair amount of build in reports, then the reporting engine, then Discover. Failing that, if you want to use non-Capita tools and actually progress you're career - PowerBI is free and a connector is like £5 per school. Now excuse me whilst I go scrub myself for saying "works out-of-the-box" AND "Capita" in the same sentence.

You won't be able to train someone in a few weeks to know SSRS and SQL to the required level. Capita won't support you (write stored procedure to use in your SSRS report) and I doubt you'll find a cost effective solution. You'll be better off going "pfff, SSRS was so 3 years ago, it's all PowerBI now" then buy a SIMS > PowerBI connector and use that \ SIMS reporting engine.

Wouldn't touch Crystal reports for all the tea in china. What you trying to do @RootsSchImp? SSRS is designed for static reports like letters. If you're after BI type reports - dashboards, summary reports, data exploration, graphs that you can drill into\filter - you'd be better off with PowerBI \ Tableau. I know some third parties have written connectors so you can just get on working with nice simple de-normalised tables rather then doing all the boring leg work.

Contact Capita, they have a DBDiag script you can run to get this info out.

Kinda missing the point of the API. You can do no more damage via the front end then via the API. I think the Assembly idea is the best way forward - stick a lovely Restful api on from of the old legacy MIS system - best bit is you can swap your MIS in and out without completely re-writing your application to work with the API. Plus is dirt cheap.

Might want to look at assembly. @Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun - Feel free to pay me a referral fee

Surely SIMS will be updated to meet GPDR requirements. Best speak with David Grashoff @ Capita regarding SIMS API costs, also it's worth speaking with Rich @ SalamanderSoft if your already using it just to see if he could add support for your solution.

True, but hardware is cheap, humans aren't. Easier to hit the go faster button then re-work the report. Also map reduce anyone

I'd question your cloud MIS if it couldn't scale up. 300,000+ rows is alot but it's small fry in the real world.

100% Not difficult to set as a group policy and it protects EVERYTHING! That's for how long SIMS waits before it retries ( or more likely) \ gives up communicating with the SQL database. So how long will it wait from you clicking the button to the server responding before it fails. So its machine timeout not user timeout.

@3s-gtech @jthompson like @KibosJ said, you just point your connect.ini directly at the server. No point having a drive just for a file. The only reason you use to do that was when you moved the server it was easier, but really, you'd just push it out via S3 nowadays. The legacy stuff is things like attendance letters, Nova-T etc, you can also use it for CTF and census files - but its the sort of stuff you don't want to give access to teachers\classroom

The password is passed via your app. User enters it into the app, then goes to AD, then passes the token to the user and runs SIMS. It's a man in the middle. Literally its in the middle of the diagram of how it works. Fine, it might not do anything wrong, but doesn't mean it can't be weaponized. Fine it's more secure then SIMS logins, but again, it's missing the point. Windows + L - lock your workstations. PS: SIMS doesn't need an S drive (except for a few legacy bits for a 1-2 users). So again, S drive = security hole.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, SIMS logins aren't secure. For starters they don't expire, they aren't case sensitive and they are vulnerable to brute force attacks.. Windows Auth and teaching staff "Windows + L" is much better solution. You wrote a man-in-the-middle program ! I'd be surprised if you didn't!

Surprised folks pay. Visual Studio Code, Bracket and Atom are all free.

SIMS shouldn't let you duplicate email addresses - was one set as home and the other as work? Sure does

I assume XIBO is for for your Digital Signage at your school. I assume every school as a Microsoft School Agreement (as it makes financial sense, ie the software is peanuts) - which gives you a ton of Azure credit included.

ContactPoint

They've been saying that for years. Look how long it's taken them to update just EduBase.

Mythic-Beasts for the win - http://www.mythic-beasts.com. RE: Docker, couldn't you use your free Azure credit?

If they guy had more then 1 computer and was a bit of a computer geek - why would he only have 1 IDE hdd with his work on?

I wouldn't want to put money on it. I admit this would stop 99.9% of folks from being able to recover data from your old hdd and if you could pick one up for £100 it might be an idea (assuming they haven't patented it).